Gartner describes leaders as companies that are "frontrunners in the convergence of single-purpose tools into an offering that supports a range of data delivery styles. These vendors are strong in the more traditional data integration patterns. They also support newer patterns and provide capabilities that enable data services in the context of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). Leaders have significant mind share in the market, and resources skilled in their tools are readily available. These vendors establish market trends, to a large degree, by providing new functional capabilities in their products, and by identifying new types of business problems to which data integration tools can bring significant value. Examples of deployments that span multiple projects and types of use cases are common among Leaders' customers."

"As big data becomes pervasive, we view data integration as a critical building block to any information management initiative," said Jim Davis, SAS Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. "When it is coupled with SAS' data quality products, customers can be confident that their enterprise data will be thoroughly transformed into complete, accurate and consistent information ready for analysis. At SAS we work extremely hard to ensure that our customers have access to a wide breadth of features for complete enterprise data access and processing across all systems and platforms."

Data Integration in Action

The State of North Carolina's Office of the State Controller worked with SAS to develop the Criminal Justice Law Enforcement Automated Services (CJLEADS) application. It replaced the manual process of integrating historical criminal data from multiple systems, reducing the risk of overlooking critical data and improving the information needs of law enforcement agencies.

"SAS' expertise in data integration and analytics, as well as strong security controls of the technical environment, application access and authentication, was critical due to the complexity and sensitivity of the data," said Kay Meyer, Project Director for the North Carolina Office of the State Controller. "Based on improved access to information, the state estimates a savings of $7 million annually."

About SAS Data Integration Technology

Traditionally strong data integration capabilities combined with a focus on emerging technologies such as big data and cloud computing make SAS Data Integration a complete solution for data management among leading organizations across industries. SAS Data Integration also delivers data quality and federation capabilities to align even more closely to the converging data management landscape. It provides an interactive, visual data integration development environment that enables collaboration and easy reusability, all with a single point of IT administration.

"Data management continues to be a strong focus for us as we build solutions to meet information management challenges," added Davis. "Combining SAS and DataFlux expertise, the team is looking forward to closer integration of SAS and DataFlux technologies. This integration will create a seamless user experience, expanding support for in-database transformations and increased connectivity to Hadoop and other big data storage technologies."

About the Magic Quadrant

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